“How we doing?”

“I’m fine,” said the medic.

“I know you’re fine. How’s he?”

The medic shook his head, smiling.

“You ain’t makin’ my night.”

Dead on arrival, but the surgeons had cracked the chest anyway in an attempt to massage a spark or two into the guy’s heart. Garvey stayed long enough to watch an intern yell for a charge nurse to move the dead man from the triage area.

“Right now,” yelled the doctor. “We got a guy coming in eviscerated.”

Saturday night in Bawlmer.

“Eviscerated,” said Garvey, enjoying the sound of the word. “Is this a great city or what?”

University Hospital couldn’t save the victim, so the rulebook called for a case in which no reliable witnesses or evidence would be recovered. And yet back at the homicide unit, the dead man’s girlfriend readily gave up most of the murder and its origins in an $8 debt. No, she didn’t see it, she claimed, but she begged the boy Tydee not to use his gun. The next morning, McAllister and Garvey both canvassed the 1500 block of Winchester Street and turned up a pair of eyewitnesses.

At that moment, Garvey did not immediately pause and go directly to the altar of the nearest Roman Catholic church. He should have, but he didn’t. Instead, he merely typed out an arrest warrant and put himself back into the rotation, thinking that this happy little streak was merely a synthesis of investigative skill and random luck.

It took another week before Rich Garvey began to realize that the hand of God was truly upon him. It took a July tavern robbery in Fairfield, with an elderly bartender dead behind the bar of Paul’s Case and every living occupant of the establishment too drunk to identify their own house keys, much less the four men who robbed the place. All except the kid in the parking lot, who happened to get the license tag of the gold Ford seen speeding off the bar’s dirt lot.

Hail Mary, mother of God.

A quick records check on the tag came back with the name of Roosevelt Smith and an address in Northeast Baltimore; right as rain, the officers arrived at the suspect’s home to find the automobile parked in front, its engine still hot. The very braindead Roosevelt Smith needed about two hours in the large interrogation room before making his first down payment on Out Number 3:

“Here’s what I believe,” offered Garvey, working without the benefit of his power suit. “This man was shot in the leg and bled out from his artery. I don’t think anyone intended this man to die.”

“I swear to God,” wailed Roosevelt Smith. “I swear to God I didn’t shoot anyone. Do I look like a killer?”

“I dunno,” answered Garvey. “What does a killer look like?”

An hour more and Roosevelt Smith was admitting to having driven the getaway car for $50 of the robbery money. He also gave up the name of his nephew, who had been inside the bar during the holdup. He didn’t know the names of the other two guys, he told Garvey, but his nephew did. As if he understood that it was up to him to keep the investigation neat and orderly, the nephew turned himself in that same morning and responded immediately to McAllister’s classic interrogative technique, the Matriarchal Appeal to Guilt.

“My mm-mother is really sick,” the nephew told the detectives in a bad stutter. “I n-need to g-g-go home.”

“Well, I’ll bet your mother would be real proud to see you now, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she?”

Ten more minutes and the nephew was crying tears and banging on the interrogation room door for the detectives. He did his mother a good turn by giving up the names of the other two men in the stickup crew. Working around the clock, Garvey, McAllister and Bob Bowman wrote warrants for two East Baltimore addresses and hit the houses just before dawn. The house on Milton Avenue yielded one suspect and a.45-caliber rifle that witnesses said was used in the robbery; the second address produced the shooter, a sawed-off little sociopath named Westley Branch.

The murder weapon, a.38 revolver, was still missing and, unlike his codefendants, Branch refused to make any statement in the interrogation room, leaving the case against him a weak one. But three days later, the trace evidence lab made up the difference by matching Branch’s fingerprints with those found on a Colt 45 malt liquor can near the Fairfield bar’s cash register.

Print hits, license tag numbers, cooperating witnesses-Garvey had indeed been touched. Hands had been laid upon him as he bounced an unmarked car back and forth across the city, turning every criminal act into an arrest warrant. The fingerprint match on the Fairfield bar murder alone demanded some kind of Old Testament offering. At the very least, Garvey should have sacrificed a virgin or a police cadet or anything else that could be the Baltimore equivalent of an unblemished heifer. A few priestly blessings, a little lighter fluid, and the Big Shift Commander in the Sky might have been appeased.

Instead, Garvey simply went back to his desk and answered the phone-the impulsive act of a man ignorant of the demands of karma.

Now, standing over the shell of a Pimlico drug dealer, he has no right to invoke the gods. He has no right to believe that the thin man now wagonbound for homicide will know anything about this murder. He has no right to expect that this same man will be looking at a five-year parole backup for that small bag of dope in his possession. He certainly has no reason to think that this man will actually know one of the shooters by name, having served some time in the Jessup Cut with the gunman.

Yet an hour after clearing the Woodland Avenue crime scene, Garvey and McAllister are writing furiously in the large interrogation room, playing host to a truly cooperative informant named Reds.

“I’m on parole,” the guy reminds Garvey. “Any kinda charge is going to back me up.”

“Reds, I need to see how you’re gonna do by us on this thing.”

The thin man nods, accepting the unspoken agreement. With a felony, it takes a downtown prosecutor to cut the deal; with a misdemeanor like drug possession, any detective can maneuver on his own, killing the charge with a quick call to the state’s attorney out at the district court. Even as Reds lays out the Woodland Avenue murder, a homicide detective is talking the Northwest District court commissioner into approving a pretrial release without bail.

“How many were there?” asks Garvey.

“Three, I’d say. But I only know two.”

“Who were they?”

“The one’s name is Stony. He’s my rap buddy.”

“What’s his real name?”

“I dunno that,” says Red.

Garvey stares at him, disbelieving. “He’s your rap buddy and you don’t know his real name?”

Reds smiles, caught in a stupid lie.

“McKesson,” he says. “Walter McKesson.”

“And the other guy?”

“I only know him by Glen. He’s one of them boys from North and Pulaski. I think Stony be working for him now.”

Little Glen Alexander, an up-and-comer in the shooting galleries along West North Avenue. McKesson is no slouch either; he beat a murder charge back in ’81. Garvey knows all that and more after a half an hour on the BPI computer. Alexander and McKesson were up in Pimlico on business, putting out free testers for all the Park Heights fiends, trying to expand their market share at the expense of someone else’s territory. A minion of one of the local Pimlico dealers, Cornelius Langley, took exception and there were some words on Woodland Avenue between Langley and Alexander that same morning. Like MacArthur, little Glen left the neighborhood declaring that he would return, and like MacArthur, he surely did.

When the gold Volvo pulled up on Woodland Avenue, Reds was walking through the alley from the Palmer Court apartments, where he had gone to score his dope. He came out on Woodland just as McKesson was taking aim at Cornelius Langley.

“Where was Glen?” asks Garvey.